I’ve been working with PHP for several years, and in November of 2007 I became part of a team tasked with researching Symfony for a new web project, with the goal of creating a plugin oriented media portal for Norway.

Other than some Java training at university, and the odd borrowed third-party classes (notably phpclasses.org) my PHP background up to this point was purely based on procedural style programming. I’d worked on some big projects, some I’m proud of and some I really want to go back to and rewrite from scratch, a sentence I’m sure you will hear from many “code monkeys”.

Symfony for me, was my first breach into the much hyped object oriented style PHP5 – and a whole new way of thinking. In the following articles, I hope to share with you the experiences I have had, with PHP5, Symfony and any other related technologies that I stumble across.

One of the things I have realised in the last few weeks, is that when searching for answers to problems that are not well documented, the most common results are in the form of developer blogs. Some of these have been invaluable to me and I’d like to credit them here, I’d also like this to become one of those blogs – since some of the answers I have sought have not been so easily forthcoming.